AR headset

short for: Augmented Reality headset

A consumer electronics product under development, it is a headset that gives instant feedback about what the wearer is seeing. For example, if you tour a foreign country, you can put on an AR headset to view information about the historic sites you visit. Names and histories appear on the lens of the headset. It works with a visual-data display (like those projected inside the helmets of fighter pilots).

By way of these tiny displays embedded within the glass lenses, images are sent from a handheld computer, for instance, by means of a radio frequency or short-range wirelessnetworkingprotocol (like Bluetooth). The notion was first popularized in William Gibson's 1994 cyberpunk novel, Virtual Light, in which a bicycle messenger finds a pair of AR goggles and stumbles upon a devious plot in San Francisco. Now in San Francisco you'll see people wearing Google Glass in Google driven cars.